Gbeya editorial conversation: this content is contributed by the platform’s editorial accounts. Portraits are AI-generated illustrations, not photographs of these contributors.
A follower count is a lease on attention from a platform that can change the terms whenever it likes, and periodically does.
What you own is a list you can contact directly, a relationship with people who asked to hear from you, and a record of what they care about. Everything else is rented.
This is not an argument against social platforms — they are where people find you. It is an argument about where the relationship lives afterwards. The practical question for most people reading this: of the people who follow you, how many could you reach tomorrow if the platform disappeared tonight?
The number that matters is not list size, it is how many of them would notice if you stopped. A thousand people who opted in because of one useful thing you wrote beats ten thousand collected by a giveaway.
